When my Dad died I didn't cry straight away, I was just stunned. It didn't seem real. I wasn't present when it happened and he'd been in hospital for a while, so I'd kind of got used to him not being in the house every day. I remember my mother standing with one arm around me, the other around my sister. They were crying, my brother and I were not, we just looked at each other like "well, what do we do now?" On the morning of the funeral there was a lot of fairly chaotic activity and that was just my family getting ready to go somewhere in its usual haphazard fashion - if felt like my Dad should be there somewhere in the background. Nothing felt unusual. But when the hearse arrived I remember deliberately not looking at it because I knew that when I looked at the coffin that would somehow make it final. So I avoided looking at it until the last possible moment: then I cried.
Three of my friends have also died over the last few years: one, about my age, apparently from suicide; another, a few years younger, from a drug overdose and the third from head injuries sustained during an epileptic fit. She was twenty three. I felt shocked and saddened by the knowledge that they were no longer in the world with me, but on the other hand I hadn't seen any of them for a while so it wasn't like they had suddenly been removed from my life in a way I would immediately feel. I didn't cry.
When we hear about people (sometimes in far-flung corners of the globe) dying from diseases, starvation or accidents etc we can know it's tragic and we can feel sad about it but unless we actually know something about the person/people in question then I don't think we have anything to actually
mourn (although I bet that the people close to them do). This is where a well-conceived, symbolic memorial can come into its own, and
this is the most effective I have ever seen. It gives you a small window into the lives of those people, albeit right at the moment those lives ended. It provides a connecting point: a plinth with names on is just a lot of names and a big war cemetery is just a big cemetery but those empty chairs enable me, at least, to visualise people out of what would otherwise be just names and statistics.
I think this is what happens when we mourn celebrities. We know things about them based on things they (and others) have said in interviews etc, and we feel like we know them (even though we may have made up a lot of it). In however indirect a way they are an important part of our lives, and for those of us who particularly admire someone, that admiration can be an important part of our lives. When Janick eventually goes I
will weep - I know that's coming - he has been such an inspiration to me in all sorts of ways, and my life has changed for the better as a result. I have no delusions that he's perfect or in any way superhuman, he just seems to be a thoroughly decent normal bloke who gives every outward appearance of being at peace with the world and himself. I just feel a bit better about the world for the knowledge that he's in it somewhere. I've never met him, but he's an important part of my life.
When our cat died I cried for at least half an hour. She had been an important part of my life for (at that point) about half of it. And when my childhood home burned down (which I mentioned in the ghosts/supernatural thread) I also spent some time crying: it felt like it was part of my life that had just gone up in smoke.
It's also possible to mourn people who are not actually dead, as I found out recently. Someone close to me decided, for reasons I have yet to understand, that I had injured them in some way deliberately, that this had been going on for several years, and that they no longer wished to have anything to do with me. (Now happily resolved, by the way.) After the initial shock had subsided the first feeling I was aware of was grief - it was literally just like a bereavement. The person in question was demonstrably not dead, they just weren't there anymore. Also when John Lawry left Petra my mother observed that I seemed to be "grieving" - I was certainly upset but I never claimed to be grieving, this was her own observation. But I suppose it was fairly accurate because to me Petra was all about John Lawry. Yet John Lawry was not dead - he just wasn't there anymore.
My overall conclusion is that what I'm actually mourning is the
loss of a person, rather than the fact they have died (similar but probably not identical to
@Onhell's observation about "unsaid" things - obviously everyone's different). But though we must eventually get used to the person not being around any more (or else go crazy), I'm not convinced we ever fully accept that they're not coming back. My Dad has been gone now for twenty years but I still see things that I know would have interested him and think "I must tell my Dad about that". And then I remember that I can't.
www.cfl.ca
). I'm hopeful that it's going to get better going forwards, because (among other things) as of yesterday all my deadlines have been met so the immediate pressure is off me; and as for the additional workload dropped on us by the govt, we've done it all once now so we have a much better idea of what we're dealing with (basically for the six weeks we weren't really sure what was coming). My next step is to try to plan my regular work more effectively and make sure my work time is clearly defined. As for the communication issues, I'm aware that my line manager has been trying to shield me (as if she didn't have enough to do already) and I know that the people at the "top" are aware it's an issue and are considering options. But we've always had this in our favour: it's a nice friendly office and our team gets on really well with each other.